Weblog.created by m. fatahpour
Weblogs: Metafilter.org was one of the only handful of collaborative/community blogs back in 2001, where thousands of "members" were able to post funny or interesting links to a page, and where other members could leave their own opinions about those links just as easily. Writing to the Web is easy. And there is an audience for my ideas. Those two concepts are at the core of why I think Weblogs have such huge potential in an educational setting. What exactly is a Weblog? In its most general sense, a Weblog is an easily created, easily updateable Web site that allows an author (or authors) to publish instantly to the Internet from any Internet connection. The earliest blogs were literally "Web logs," or lists of sites a particular author visited on any given day that would be revised by changing the HTML code and updating the file on a server. But soon, the Internet geeks who maintained these sites developed software to automate the process and allow other people to collaborate. Happily, blogging today doesn't require any knowledge of code or FTP. It takes as much skill as sending an e-mail. But what really distinguishes a blog from your run-of-the-mill Web site is much more than process; it's what you'll find there. Weblogs are not built on static chunks of content. Instead, they are comprised of reflections and conversations that in many cases are updated every day (if not three or four times a day). Blogs engage readers with ideas and questions and links. They ask readers to think and to respond. They demand interaction. Blogs are a collaborative space, as readers become a part of the writing and learning process. Being able to connect ideas and resources via linking is one of logging’s most important strengths. In large measure, it is blogs that have opened up the Read/Write frontier for content creation to the Web, and over 1 80 million people have now taken advantage of the opportunity. Remember, two new blogs are being created every second, and that pace shows no sign of slowing down. Now, that doesn't mean that everyone who creates a blog becomes a dedicated blogger; two-thirds of all blogs go for more than two months without being updated. so many of our would-be students have embraced the concept of publishing to the Web, and it bodes well for our use of these technologies in the classroom. What's somewhat discouraging, to me at least, is that these teenagers use these sites more as social tools than learning tools, and their behavior is sometimes reckless. Blogging is a genre that engages students and adults in a process of thinking in words, not simply an accounting of the day's events or feelings. In fact, teach a specialist Fernette and Brock Edie’s research shows that blogging in its truest form has a great deal of potentially positive impact on students. They found that blogs can: • promote critical and analytical thinking; • be a powerful promoter of creative, intuitive, and associational thinking; • promote analogical thinking; • be a powerful medium for increasing access and exposure to quality information; • combine the best of solitary reflection and social interaction (EideNeurolearning Blog, 2005) Many blogs provide commentary on a particular subject; others function as more personal online diaries; others function more as online brand advertising of a particular individual or company. A typical blog combines text, images, and links to other blogs, Web pages, and other media related to its topic. The ability of readers to leave comments in an interactive format is an important contribution to the popularity of many blogs. Most blogs are primarily textual, although some focus on art (art blogs), photographs (photoblogs), videos (video blogs or "vlogs"), music (MP3 blogs), and audio (podcasts). Microblogging is another type of blogging, featuring very short posts. In education, blogs can be used as instructional resources. These blogs are referred to as edublogs. Adopters of Weblogs in the classroom have already created a wide variety of ways to use them, and they have shown that blogs can enhance and deepen learning.